'Patera Pike-my predecessor, and a most devout man-used to call out in dreams,' Silk told her. 'Sometimes he'd wake me in the next room. I think you may be afraid to speak, believing that this, too, is a dream; and that you might wake other sleepers. It isn't, so you will not.' .
She nodded, the movement of her head barely perceptible. 'I may have called out in the beginning. One was small, the Monarch's second daughter. The one you used to see dance.'
'Moipe?' Silk suggested.
'I remember seeing her often at home, dancing through my dreams. She was a wonderful dancer, but we cheered because we were afraid. You saw the hunger in her face for the kind of cheers the others got.'
'It may be Pas who favors you,' Silk decided. 'Indeed it probably is, since the moving room carried us straight to this shrine of his. If so, he'll certainly be offended if we don't visit it, after all that he's done for us. Won't you come with me?'
She joined him on the uppermost step, and side-by-side they descended the spiral, seeing the footprints of those who had preceded them in the thin dust on the treads, and shivering in the cool air of the shaft, which narrowed and grew darker as they descended.
They were less than halfway down when a faint odor of decay set Silk's nostrils twitching; it was as though an altar had not been properly cleansed and purified, and he (assuming that the shrine he anticipated included such an altar) resolved to purify it himself if need be.
Mamelta, who had lagged behind him by a few steps, now touched his arm. 'Is that a hammerstone?' Silk looked back at her. 'Hammerstone? Where?'
'Down there.' She indicated the bottom of the shaft by a vague gesture. 'Moaning? Something is moaning.'
Silk stopped to listen; the sound was so faint that he could not lie certain he did not imagine it, an eerie keen- ing, rising and falling, always at the edge of his hearing, and often threatening to fade away altogether.
It was no louder at the bottom, where the soldier lay. Silk gripped the dead man's left arm and rolled him over, in the process discovering that he was no longer as strong as he had been. There was a ragged hole the size of his thumb in the dead man's blue-painted chest.
When he had recovered breath he said, 'You'd better stand back, Mamelta. Chems seldom explode once the moment of death is past, but there's always a risk.' Squat- ting, he employed one of the steel gammas forming the voided cross he wore to remove the dead man's faceplate. When bridging connections with the gamma produced no arc, he shook his head.
'How . . . ? Mamelta is my name, and I told you. Have you told me yours?'
'Patera Silk.' He straightened up. 'Call me Patera, please. Were you about to ask how this man died?'
'He is a machine.' She was looking at the dead man's wound. 'A robot?'
'A soldier,' Silk told her, 'though I've never seen a blue one before. Ours are mottled-green, brown, and black-so I suppose he must have come from another city. In any case he's been dead a long time, while someone in the shrine is alive and in pain.'
A massive door in the side of the shaft stood ajar. Silk opened it and stepped into the shrine, finding himself (to his astonishment) in a circular room a full thirty cubits high, with padded divans and glasses and multicolored readouts on its ceiling, its floor, and its curving wall. Every glass was energized, and in them all bobbed a tattered, skull-like thing that was no longer a face, wailing.
He clapped his hands. 'Monitor!'
Gabbling sounds issued from the face. An irregular hole opened and closed; the sounds rose to a piercing shriek and a trapdoor in the center of the room flew back.
'It wants you to go into the nose,' Mamelta said.
Silk crossed to the opening in the floor and stared down. At its bottom, fifty cubits away, swam three bright pinpricks that moved as one; irresistibly reminded of similar lights at the bottom of a grave he had dreamed was Orpine's, he watched until they vanished, replaced by a single spark. 'I'm going down there.' 'Yes. That is what it wants.'
'The monitor? Could you understand him?'
She shook her head, a minute motion. 'I have seen this. Going to the ship that would lift us off the Whorl.'
'This can't be any sort of boat,' Silk protested. 'This entire shrine must be embedded in solid rock.'
'That is its berth,' she murmured, but he had dropped to the floor already and swung his legs into the circular opening revealed by the trapdoor. Rungs set in the wall permitted him to climb down to a lucent bubble through which he looked across a benighted plain of naked rock. As he stared at it, a nameless mental mechanism adjusted, and the sparks swarming under the concave crystal floor were not merely distant but infinitely remote, the lamps and fires of new skylands.
'Great Pas ...'
The divine name sounded empty and foolish here, though he had employed it with no doubts of its validity all his life; Great Pas was not so great as this, nor was Pas a god here, outside.
Silk swallowed, dry-mouthed and swallowing nothing, then traced the sign of addition with the gammadion he wore about his neck. 'This is what you showed me, isn't it? The same thing I saw in the ball court, the black velvet and colored sparks below my feet.'
There was, or so it seemed to him, an assent that was not a spoken word.
It steadied him as nothing else could have. One at a time, he removed his sweating hands from the icy rungs of the ladder and wiped them on his tunic.
'If you wish for me to die, then I'll die, I know; and I wouldn't have it otherwise. But after you showed me this in the ball court, you asked me to save our manteion, so please let me go back to-to the whorl I know. I'll offer you a white bull, I swear, as soon as I can afford it.'
This time there was no response.
He stared about him; some of the pinpricks of light were red, some yellow as topaz, some violet, many like diamonds. Here and there he saw what appeared to be mists or clouds of light-whole cities, surely. The somber plain was pitted like the cheeks of a child who had survived the pox, and far more barren than the sheer cliffs of the Pilgrims' Way; no tree, no flower, no least weed or dot of moss sprouted from its rock.
Silk remained where he was, staring down at the gleaming dark, until Mamelta, from a higher rung, touched the top of his head to get his attention; then he started, peered up at her in surprise, and looked away, dismayed by his glimpse of her unclothed loins.
'What you found? I have found where it belongs. Give it to me.'
'I'll bring it,' he told her. When he tried to climb, he discovered that his hands were cold and stiff. 'You mean the card?'
She did not reply.
All the rooms were small, though the widest was lined with innumerable divans and was higher than the principal tower of the Grand Manteion, facing the Prolocutor's palace on the Palatine. In a room above that very tall cylindrical room, Silk's heel slipped on a small white rotted thing, and he learned where the pervasive odor of decay originated. A dozen such flecks of dead flesh were scattered over the floor. He asked Mamelta what they were, and she bent to examine one and said, 'Human.'
Crouching to look at another, he recognized the coarse black dust in which it lay; the polished metal cabinet that had presumably held thousands or tens of thousands originally had, like the room in which Mamelta and so many other bios had stood sleeping, been sealed with the Seal of Pas; that seal had been broken, and the embryos flung wantonly about. At the schola, Silk had been taught to regard the mere misuse of any divine name as blasphemous. If that was true, what was this? Shuddering, he hurried after Mamelta.
In a compartment so small that he could not help brushing against her, she pointed to a frame and dangling wires. 'This is the place. You won't know how to tag it. Let me.'
Curious, and still half-stunned by the looting of Pas's treasures, he gave her a card. She attached three clips, then studied a glass overhead. 'This is a different kind,' she said. Stooping, she inserted it in the frame at ankle height. 'Let me see them all.'
He did; and she tested each as she had the first, working slowly and appearing unsure of her decisions at times, but always making the correct one. As she worked, a broken gray face took shape in the glass. 'Is it time?' the face inquired-and again: 'Is it time?' Silk shook his head, but the face continued to inquire.
